


Monday in the Park with an Officer of the Law

by finnimbrand



Series: Wanda in the City [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, POV Wanda Maximoff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 12:43:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8751850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnimbrand/pseuds/finnimbrand
Summary: Wanda has some decisions to make when her ally in the police gets angry about station politics.





	

The window near her bed leaked when the wind was from the north; there was a cold puddle on the floor and Wanda stepped in it with her bare foot, getting out of bed. Her only client canceled without rescheduling. The microwave sparked and died and she couldn't manage to choke down the cold, half-cooked oatmeal. She was recognized in the diner where she tried to buy breakfast and had to flee, sowing confusion behind her. She'd only nudged the waiter's mind a tiny bit, but she thought he'd ended up convinced he'd seen Elvis.

That was worth a giggle once she was safely back in her room again, even if she had to force it. She sat on her bed and watched the water stream down the window and the growing stain on the wall, many cocentric layers of dampness, and and tried to feel grateful for this moment of peace.

Peace was not something that she'd had a lot of in her life. She didn't know how to appreciate it.

"If you were here, I would not be bored," she told the picture of her brother, currently sitting on the table by her bed. He didn't reply. He was too disgusted with her, she thought. She was alive; she was supposed to be doing something with her life, not sitting in her room...afraid to go out.

"I locked me in my room," she muttered, but even that didn't make her angry enough to do anything about it.

Eventually she noticed that the rain had stopped.

Feeling very put upon that her excuse was evaporating in the sudden sunlight, she put on a baseball cap -- she'd learned that sometimes the simplest disguise is the best -- and dragged herself out into the sunlight. She would visit the park at the edge of the neighborhood. 

 

Officer Sarah Nicholson, the cop who took Wanda's money and kept Wanda's secret identity secret, had worn loose, casual clothes when she came to Wanda's room posing as a client for Wanda's illicit fortune-telling enterprise, but Wanda had sensed her confidence.

In her uniform, she strolled through the park with a brash strut that belonged naturally to someone who had the right to stop anyone she set eyes on and come up with a reason later. 

"You look smart," Wanda said, her eyes tracing the taser and the radio on Officer Nicholson's belt. Smart? Was that the right word?

"I'll take that as a compliment," Officer Nicholson said in a jocular tone. No, maybe not quite the right word. 

"It is a pleasant park," Wanda said to change the subject. "I did not realize there would be a pond -- and ducks! So cute! -- or I would have come to see it sooner."

Officer Nicholson brightened. "I've got something else for you, something you might not 've noticed your first time around," she said.

"Oh, I do not want to take you away from--"

"No, you gotta see this, and it's part of my job to show you." The bright smile faded. "Or at least it used to be."

"Of course you must do your job," Wanda said, mystified and a little reluctant. But she had nothing better to do, so she fell in a couple of steps behind Officer Nicholson's loud chatter about how the area of the park she wanted Wanda to see had once been filled with drunks and deadbeats, but the place had been turned around by a new policy and a new use for the space a few years ago...

Wanda watched the other park-goers. The lecture was attracting attention, but they were looking at the officer, not at her. That was acceptable.

"So _now_ ," Officer Nicholson said loudly, waiting for Wanda to catch up. Wanda tried not to feel like a truant.

"Now this area is filled with artists selling their work in an open air market." Wanda repeated the information she'd just learned with quiet irony about her role here. "And they might be able to point me toward more clients who want their fortune told. I understand."

Officer Nicholson seemed surprised. "Gotta get you settled in," she said.

Wanda forced herself to smile. Authority had rarely been on her side in her life -- but there were always exceptions. She wanted Officer Nicholson to be an exception; she'd better act like it.

"Tell me more about the artist you were talking about, the new one?" she said. 

 

They reached the other side of the park in a few minutes of walking. The path swung past a riot of flower beds and into a strand of trees, and then out into an open air amphitheater. Wanda could understand why this area had not been popular. Trees blocked the light and the view of the rest of the park, and inside the circle of trees the theater seemed cramped; the proportions of the grassy steps that formed the audience area were too steep in some places, too shallow in others.

But the artists had done their best with it, some of the more enterprising even adding platforms to widen the pedestrian area and banners to advertise their stalls. Other artists had nothing but a blanket and a pile of inexpensive jewelry. Ceramics, leather, paintings...

"It reminds me a little..." Wanda began, but Officer Nicholson wasn't listening. Wanda followed her gaze across the amphitheater and saw another police officer haranguing one of the artists.

"Why that little bastard," Officer Nicholson said, and broke into a jog, cutting through the crowd like a shark through a school of fish.

At first Wanda thought she had been talking about the artist, but it was the other officer that she spun around with a heavy hand on his shoulder. The argument that followed made Wanda glad she'd stayed where she was at the entrance to the amphitheater. Around her, artists and customers glanced at the pair of officers and then quickly away; no stares, but Wanda could sense a lot of curiosity in addition to hers.

"This keeps happening," a freckled artist with curly red hair sitting crossed legged on a highly decorated blanket moaned.

"You shush," a woman with dark skin commanded from behind the table in the nearest stall.

Wanda crouched down next to the curly-haired woman. "Do you know them?" she asked quietly, seeing an opportunity to find out more about Officer Nicholson. She knew that Officer Nicholson didn't mean her any harm, but she ought to know more than that about her ally, especially if she might end up pulling Wanda into her fights.

For once I'd like to stay out of the fights, Wanda thought grimly, and turned her attention back to the artists. The curly-haired one started the explanation, but the woman from the stall soon joined in to make sure the curly-haired one got it right.

The picture that emerged was not cheering. The park was under the jurisdiction of one large police precinct, but that was a recent change. Two separate precincts had been joined together to make the new precinct, one Deputy Inspector in charge of the new precinct, the other transferred across the city. Officers loyal to their former boss, officers loyal to the new boss...

"And which side is Officer Nicholson on?" Wanda asked.

"Our side," the curly-haired woman said. The other artist nodded agreement, and launched into a story about a problem Officer Nicholson had helped her with. It was a convoluted tale of forms and subtleties of law, full of reassurances that no matter what happened it could be dealt with and advice for dealing with similar situations. 

Wanda idly wondered why she seemed to attract people who wanted to teach her. Did she come across as such an innocent, just waiting to be filled with knowledge and purpose? Was it her guilt, that made her unconsciously try to hide what she was capable of? Did her fear and uncertainty provoke reassurance?

With a sense of doom she halted her train of thought right there, to examine it more closely. Once her specialty had been provoking fear; was she branching out without even realizing it?

Was that what she wanted?

A nudge from the curly-haired woman woke Wanda to the approach of the other police officer, closely followed by Officer Nicholson. Wanda drew back from the path onto a corner of the blanket, though there was barely room in the gap between the arched entrance and the stall for two of them.

"I'll bring this to the Deputy Inspector, or higher if I have to," Officer Nicholson said as she passed. She was no longer shouting, but her low voice was furious.

The other officer turned back. "Don't you realize there was a reason your boss got transferred away from here? You can try whatever you want, I wouldn't put it past you, but we're going to have order here." He was angry too, but it was a cold, smug anger, a kind that felt familiar to Wanda. She leaned forward, her mind open to the sensation, and then drew back, shaken by the brush of a desire she'd once known intimately, before she gave it up. 

The exhilaration of revenge when the goal was in sight.

As the two officers passed through the archway, Wanda bowed her head. All she'd wanted was a walk in the park, and instead she'd discovered the plans for an ambush, and Officer Nicholson already half trapped. She was loud and outspoken in her support of the exiled Deputy Inspector, and that made her a target for the other side.

But now Wanda knew the plan, and she could stop it. It would be easy. Or maybe not so easy. It all depend on just how angry Officer Nicholson was, and how willing she'd be to let Wanda use her powers to help. Looking the other way was one thing, getting involved...

"You okay?" the curly-haired artist asked.

Wanda nodded and got to her feet. "I've got to go," she said. She bought a few of the sketches from the curly-haired artist, shook her head regretfully at the large canvases in the stall. "Outside my range," she said.

"Special discount for any friend of Nicholson," the woman said with a grin.

Wanda shook her head. 

"Come back soon, then," the woman said. "We'll still be around somewhere, no matter what they try. It's like I said..."

"People find a way to do what they need to do," Wanda said.

"That's right."

 

Wanda caught up with Officer Nicholson a block away from the station. When she turned to see who was calling her name, Wanda thought of a volcano, stewing and slowly boiling.

"Not now," Officer Nicholson snapped, shaking off Wanda's hand on her arm. "I'm busy--" She looked around and then drew Wanda a few step into a nearby alley. "And hell, what are you doing showing your face this close, anyway? Don't you have any respect for my skin?"

"That's why I'm here," Wanda said. She lowered her voice and leaned in closer to the maelstrom. "Because I do have respect for...your skin. Enough to come to warn you that if you go into that station and act as angry as you feel, you'll be fired within the hour."

"Bullshit."

"I didn't have to warn you," Wanda said.

"And how do you know more than I know myself about the situation in there?"

Wanda just looked at her. 

"Right," Officer Nicholson said with an air of finality. "So it's a trap? Any ideas about what I should do about it?"

Wanda smiled wildly in relief. That had gone down so much easier than expected. "Will you trust me?" she asked eagerly, the plan she'd come up suddenly seeming a little less crazy.

"I figure I've got no reason not to."

But that was not quite good enough. "I mean do you trust me enough to let me into the police station and show me around?"

Officer Nicholson barely hesitated. Wanda gave her full credit for that. "Sure, I trust you. At least, I do if you assure me that you'll help me get the bastards who're trying to get me."

Now it was Wanda's turn to hesitate, guilt and uneasiness battered into churning mistrust inside of her by the slow anger she sensed from Officer Nicholson. She'd sworn off revenge after the way it turned out the last time. Taking sides? It was the same thing again.

"What, you got something against that?"

Wanda gently removed Officer Nicholson's hand from her arm. "Let's start with getting you out of trouble," Wanda said carefully. Too carefully. She felt her rejection take hold of some uncertain place within Officer Nicholson's mind.

"Why you--"

It scared her, how quickly the anger had turned. Either for me or against me. Wanda's hands moved, shaping a shield out of the thin air that separated her from Officer Nicholson.

Officer Nicholson's eyes got very wide, and she took a step back and put a hand on her belt. Wanda couldn't tell which of the accouterments she was reaching for. 

After a few seconds where the result hung in the balance, Wanda sensed Officer Nicholson's anger had peaked. When it had faded a little more, Wanda let her shield drop again.

"I've got a temper," Officer Nicholson admitted. "But you--"

"I'm offering to help," Wanda said. "Is that enough for you, or do you want...more?"

"I could have you--"

Wanda waited. This was not anger, it was the same pride that let Officer Nicholson strut around the park and draw Wanda into her orbit in the first place. But pride was incompatible with threats, and after a few seconds Officer Nicholson shook her head regretfully. "I'd like to see you cut through all the bullshit that happens around this station, but we'd both regret it later, wouldn't we?"

Something deep within Wanda still ached with fear, and longed for the clarity of the fear she could induce. Or, if not fear in its pure form, then a protective fear -- she wanted to back down, to ask to be taught, to be shown the right way to go. Make herself something to be feared for, something valuable and vulnerable, to be protected.

She knew where she was with fear.

This regret, this respect -- it was strange. Not unprecedented, but strange. Could she trust it? 

"All right," Officer Nicholson said heavily. "We'll do it your way."

Wanda let out her breath. She guessed she would find out.

And that was how it happened that Wanda spent her Monday afternoon ghosting around the police station, using every mental trick she had to keep anyone there from looking at her, until she found the forged licenses that were meant to frame Officer Nicholson and replaced them with the art she'd bought back in the market.

 

"She didn't get fired." 

Wanda rehearsed the story she had no one to tell in an empty room that night. The wind had died down and the water stain had stopped growing, and the picture of her brother floated in a mist of rosy tendrils shaped into a bouquet of funeral flowers, just above her head as she lay on the bed.

"When they found the artwork instead of the forgeries they were expecting, she told them it was just a little joke... She showed the pictures around the station, and even sold a few of them. And she _claims_ that she's building support for a quiet revolution inside the station..."

Wanda sighed, and let the picture settle on the table beside the bed. She rolled over and pressed her cheek to the pillow, staring at Pietro. 

"She's not Steve Rogers. She's vain and struts around thoughtlessly... She's more like Tony Stark."

Wanda pushed her thoughts through the sticky thicket of revulsion her mind conjured up along with that name. "Tony Stark is loyal," she admitted. "Sometimes. But I was foolish to think that because I trusted Steve Rogers and not Tony Stark, I could be an Avenger. I thought..." She sighed. "At least I know what I'm getting into, being her secret ally. You have to have someone." 

Never mind that Wanda's only real confidant was the picture of a dead man.

"She thinks she's right, and makes sure she benefits from it too. She helps, then she sells the result for a little profit." Wanda choked on a tiny laugh. "It's something new."

Wanda turned over onto her back and gestured the lights out. 

"It will not be like last time," she said to the darkness. "Perhaps again she will need someone to look out for her; I will do that. And I will let her help me. But we will have no illusions about each other."

The darkness had nothing to say to that.


End file.
